He once wrote his daughter, with the disarming honesty that was an essential part of his make-up, “I didn’t know till 15 that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty.”
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His last undergraduate story, “The Pierian Springs and the Last Straw,” was his most ambitious and his best, for in it the reader comes to understand more about the nature of the woman who is able to reduce her men to pathetic figures. She demands that they be heroes while challenging them in such a way that they fail utterly.
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But Scott was not the only man who courted her; a mustached aviator amused her for a while, until he proposed and she flatly turned him down. Astonished at having been refused, he asked her why she had kissed him, and she replied that she’d never kissed a man with a mustache before.
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When she saw him leave with another girl she was suddenly jealous, not only of the girl but of him; of the aloofness which he could summon and which held him apart from her. She wanted it to be herself alone with whom he shared that pale detachment. With the summer nearly gone Scott carefully noted in his Ledger that on September 7 he had fallen in love with Zelda. He had many competitors, and she encouraged them, but that provoked his desire for her even further. Shrewdly, she understood that quite clearly. Many years later she wrote: “He was almost certainly falling in love which was acceptable to him. He had planned his life for story anyway.”
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She wrote in pencil usually, quickly and carelessly, not bothering to date her letters, nor to punctuate them, except for the characteristic school-girlish dash that separated each thought, or the occasional word underlined for emphasis. Her hand was large and round and upright; she called it her “sun-burned, open-air looking script.”
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It’s the first time I’ve seen early morning in a terribly long time— The sun all yellow and red, like a huge luminous peach hanging on a black shadow-tree—just visible thru the mist—and the family all sleepy-eyed and sad. Cold toes and tangled hair—I don’t think I’ll forget this morning. It’s so much nicer to wake up early— I’ve felt so clean and wholesome all day because I saw the sun rise—
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Scott—there’s nothing in all the world I want but you-and your precious love—All the material things are nothing. I’d just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence—-because you’d soon love me less—and less— and I’d do anything-anything—to keep your heart for my own— I don’t want to live—I want to love first, and live incidentally— Why don’t you feel that I’m waiting— I’ll come to you, Lover, when you’re ready— Don’t —don’t ever think of the things you can’t give me— You’ve trusted me with the dearest heart of all—and it’s so damn much more than anybody else in all the world has ever had—
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Meanwhile Zelda was growing impatient in Montgomery; she was tired of waiting for Scott to make his fortune, and her petulance began to show in her letters. Writing about a woman she knew, she told Scott that all women “love to fancy themselves suffering— they’re nearly all moral and mental hypo-crondiacs—If they’d just awake to the fact that their excuse and explanation is the necessity for a disturbing element among men—they’d be much happier, and the men much more miserable-which is exactly what they need for the improvement of things in general.” It was a nearly perfect summary of Zelda’s own attitude toward men and Scott did not miss it. He put her letter almost verbatim into his novel This Side of Paradise.
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I think I like breathing twilit gardens and moths more than beautiful pictures or good books— It seems the most sensual of all the senses-Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell-a smell of dying moons and shadows-
I’ve spent to-day in the grave-yard— It really isn’t a cemetery, you know, trying to unlock a rusty iron vault built in the side of the hill. It’s all washed and covered with weepy, watery blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes-sticky to touch with a sickening odor— The boys wanted to get in to test my nerve to-night— I wanted to feel “William Wreford, 1864.” Why should graves make people feel in vain? I’ve heard that so much, and Grey is so convincing, but somehow I can’t find anything hopeless in having lived— All the broken columnes and clasped hands and doves and angels mean romances-and in an hundred years I think I shall like having young people speculate on whether my eyes were brown or blue—of cource, they are neither— I hope my grave has an air of many, many years ago about it— Isn’t it funny how, out of a row of Confederate soldiers, two or three will make you think of dead lovers and dead loves—when they’re exactly like the others, even to the yellowish moss? Old death is so beautiful-so very beautiful-We will die together—I know—
Sweetheart—
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In a rather pathetic attempt to keep her home, Scott had sent her Compton Mackenzie’s book Flasher’s Mead to read. But she didn’t like it:
“Nothing annoys me more than having the most trivial action analyzed and explained.” She said the heroine was “ATROCIOUSLY uninteresting” and maybe she’d save the book and try to read it again in rainy weather. But she also tipped her hand more than she may have intended, for in the same letter she told him, “People seldom interest me except in their relations to things, and I like men to be just incidents in books so I can imagine their characters _” Everything, it seemed, had to revolve around her, her perceptions, her games, or she was not interested and refused to play. Certainly that letter carried a note of warning about herself, if Fitzgerald had been in any condition to receive it. But he was not. He knew the terms, they were remarkably like his own, and that exquisite egotism drew him even more completely to her.
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With the money he bought himself a pair of smart white flannels and sent Zelda a sweater. She wrote that it was “perfectly delicious-and I’m going to save it till you come in June so you can tell me how nice I look— It’s funny, but I like being ‘pink and helpless’— When I know I seem that way, I feel terribly competent—and superior.” Adding, with that touch of self-perception she summoned for Scott alone: “I keep thinking, ‘Now those men think I’m purely decorative, and they’re just fools for not knowing better’— and I love being rather unfathomable. You are the only person on earth, Lover, who has ever known and loved all of me. Men love me cause I’m pretty-and they’re always afraid of mental wickedness-and men love me cause I’m clever, and they’re always afraid of my prettiness— One or two have even loved me cause I’m lovable, and then, of cource, I was acting.”
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Once home and sober, Zelda thought better about being pinned while being engaged to Scott and returned the Georgian’s fraternity pin with a sentimental note. Carelessly—for she was to insist that it was an accident— Zelda put the letter intended for the young golfer into an envelope that she sent to Scott. Furious, he asked her never to write to him again.
Nevertheless, Zelda did try to explain, but it was an awkward situation for which there really was no explanation.
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Edgy and fatigued, knowing full well, as he was to write, “I was in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it,” Scott decided that Zelda had to marry him immediately. They sat together in the familiar front room of the Sayres’ house and Scott asked her to marry him now. Zelda refused. Both cried, and Scott stormed and tried to force her into marrying him with wild kisses and frantic arguments. He began to beseech Zelda, which was not at all the right tactic, for it demeaned him in her eyes, and she more resolutely than ever shied from accepting his proposal. He became self-pitying and would not leave the house.
I wish New York were a little tiny town—so I could imagine how it’d be. I haven’t the remotest idea of what it’s like, so I am afraid to make any suggestions.” But she did tell him that she imagined their apartment decorated with large orange and black fruits on the walls and bright yellow ceilings.
Although Zelda told Scott that it would break her heart to try to do something and find out that she could not, and that faced with that choice she would rather not try, she was nevertheless aware that Scott had drawn on some of her own writing in This Side of Paradise, and half seriously, she suggested maybe she would try to write, too. In a letter to Scott she revealed something of her own ambivalence about the effort involved, and something of her idea of herself:
Yesterday I almost wrote a book or story, I hadn’t decided which, but after two pages on my heroine I discovered that I hadn’t even started her, and, since I couldn’t just write forever about a charmingly impossible creature, I began to despair. “Vamping Romeo” was the name, and I guess a man would have had to appear somewhere before the end. But there wasn’t any plot, so I thought I’d ask you how to decide what they’re going to do. Mamma answered my S.O.S. with one of O. Henry’s, verbatum, which I discarded because he never created people-just things to happen to the same old kind of folks and unexpected ends, and I like stories with all the ladies like Constance Talmadge and the men just sorter strong, silent characters or college boys—… And so you see, Scott, I’ll never be able to do anything because I’m much too lazy to care whether it’s done or not— And I don’t want to be famous and feted-all I want is to be very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own —to live and be happy and die in my own way to please myself—
it.
No personality as strong as Zelda’s could go without getting criticism … I’ve always known that, any girl who gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has “kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more,” cannot be considered beyond reproach even if above it…. I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect and its these things I’d believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all that she should be… I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything. You’re still a catholic but Zelda’s the only God I have left now.
The day before Easter Sunday, April 3, 1920, Scott and Zelda met in the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Zelda wore a suit of midnight blue with a matching hat trimmed with leather ribbons and buckles; she carried a bouquet of orchids and small white flowers. It was a brilliantly sunny day and when they stepped outside the cathedral Zelda looked for all the world like a young goddess of spring, with Scott at her side as consort.
hexafu 